Press Release

Art is not kind to its audience. It does not flow in an instant and steals audience’s emotional reaction like music does, or explains in a directly understood language like literature does. It simply stands still and waits until someone approaches. As we confront an artwork with such arrogance and shyness, at first it doesn’t seem easily approachable. However, this suggests that as an audience we are provided with many options to experience art.

As the idea of ‘observation’ sounds too general to many of us, there is a primary guideline we would like to give you, which is, a title of a work. If you think about a work, one can say it is quite irregular. Depending on various circumstances, whether there ‘is’ a title, or ‘what’ is a title, a range, direction and type of emotion easily shifts, and fundamentally it is not confined by the physical nature of an artwork and possess its independent position. Even more, such form is ‘a text,’ of which many artists take a great care.

At this point we would like to suggest a new way of enjoying artworks through this year’s Star Wars Episode Exhibition. That is, looking at the artworks (listen and feel them) and sharing your response by giving a name to your own feelings to these works. (Like a poem or a novel, which has a free form of text.) This goes beyond an interaction between an image and a text, which will enable the expansion, development of an individual response, leading to a new level of creativity as well as meaningful experience to everyone.

Especially for this show, we have invited four very distinguished abstract artists of own colors – Min Ha Park, Sung Yoon Chung, Rainer Neumeier, Tobias Lehner – and prepared a venue to newly discover abstract painting and sculpture, which are often considered difficult to understand. Through the abstraction of works by these artists (Park who paints abstract scenery with as much emotions removed as possible, Jung who portrays the poetic symbolism through a simplified form of machines, Neumeier whose work can be interpreted as figurative forms or abstract signs, Lehner who proceeds with a visual experimentation that originates from music), audience will be able to stretch out their imagination to their fullest.

Also, we are provided with an opportunity to take a look at insights from very talented literary professionals (a poet Sung Ho Kim, Jong Uk Yoon, novelists Sung Wook Chang and Jung Hyun Han, who have gained much attention as a rising star of a new year). Audience will have chance to experience both the artworks and the texts (the writers’ responses to the artworks). Such interaction between two genres of art might seem unfamiliar pleasure at first, but we hope it provides a great support for audience to truly enjoy and appreciate the works of artists during the show.

Therefore, we would like to suggest to our audience. First, take your time as you visit our gallery. In front of a work that catches your attention, we suggest you to deconstruct it into fillings and threads, to wander around the sunken and floating layers, to repeat dissolution and reconstruction of a work as a small universe. We suggest you to look at a work with a mind as if I call his name he comes to me as a ‘flower.’ Then, sit on a table in the gallery and carefully give a name to your dear emotion. Then, suddenly from a valley in between the work and your writing, you shall experience an echoing resonance.

This year is the seventh (7th) year of Star Wars Episode Exhibition, the annual project featuring a number of prominent

contemporary artists in Korea as well as global artists. Also, we hope to provide a bridge between a contemporary art and audience by introducing 21st century contemporary abstract art through fresh and creative means.